Watching God Without a Screen (For a Change)

Last updated on: May 26, 2016 at 1:30 pm by Paul Asay

Watching God Without a Screen (For a Change) 2016-05-26T13:30:46-06:00 Paul Asay

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Well, hi there, stranger! Welcome to my newish blog. It’s not really new, of course. Just remodeled—new address, new look, and as of today a new blog post. Because really, it’s about time.

While experts were tinkering away at the Watching God blog, I was off in Washington state, knocking around a couple of national parks with my wife. When you watch movies and television for a living, it’s nice to see the world without a filtering screen sometimes, and this was a fairly screen-free trip. Very few televisions and spotty internet access equals ideal vacation.

And as we tromped through chilly rain forests, peered in anemone-rich tide pools and ogled mountains forever veiled in snow, I thought of author Annie Dillard, listening to a mockingbird in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. “We have been as usual asking the wrong question,” she writes of the mockingbird’s song. “It does not matter a hoot what the mockingbird on the chimney is singing. The real and proper question is: Why is it beautiful?”

Mount Rainier

We know, I suppose, the science behind the places I saw—the volcanic energies that sprouted these mountains, the climates and currents that made these rain forests, the tidal and primal forces that push life into the pools. But why do we find them so beautiful?

While on vacation, I was reading Neil MacGregor’s A History of the World in 100 Objects. One such object was the “Swimming Reindeer,” thought to have been fashioned around 11,000 B.C. It is, as far as scholars know, one of the world’s first works of art. The artist was doing more than simply counting reindeer: He was trying to suggest the grace and power of these animals, too. They were more than food. They were beautiful.

swimming reindeer

Music, laughter, beauty. These are inherently spiritual things—things that suggest a deeper ache in the soul. Evolution can explain powerful emotions such as love and hate, sins like sloth or envy. But it’s difficult for me to imagine what evolutionary purpose wonder serves. Why we find nature quite so lovely.

Sometimes there seems to be a correlation between beauty and usefulness: Certainly the Swimming Reindeer were eminently useful creatures for the artist. But Mount Rainier is hardly useful in a traditional sense … not to most of us who still find ourselves gaping at its snowcapped majesty. The ferns and flowers I saw while hiking are utterly useless. But they make me smile and point and pause. The things we may find beautiful can be useful … or not. They can be big or small, filled with power and danger or be alarmingly inoffensive. And yet they move us in unexplainable ways.

View of the Columbia River

The Bible tells us that we were made in His image, and I wonder if our wonder is evidence of that. We marvel at His own works of art. When we see something beautiful in the natural world, perhaps we feel a hint of the joy He felt when He created it.

“Nature is full of genius, full of divinity,” Henry David Thoreau wrote, “so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.”

This blog is called “Watching God,” and for the most part it’s about seeing God, or hints of God, in our stories—our books, our movies, our television shows. But more broadly, it’s about seeing God wherever we go. I believe His fingerprints are everywhere. And sometimes we see it best when the only story is His, wordless and wonderful.

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